Phase Gate Timelines in Excel

How to build a phase gate timeline using Excel and OnePager Express

If you track key project milestones or phase gates in an Excel spreadsheet, you need a way to present them in a clear, consise report. OnePager Express can take the key milestones from your Excel spreadsheet and turn it into a phase gate timeline in just a few steps.

To begin, set up an Excel spreadsheet to track your key phase gates. Your spreadsheet doesn't have to be identical to this one, though this example is nice because it shows you how to track phase gates across multiple projects at once:

You can build your phase gate timeline using your entire spreadsheet, or you can include an "Add to OnePager" column as we did to select only the key phase gates we want to report on:

Then, on the import screen, click the Change button to select our "Multi-Project Milestone Chart" template as a starting point. Then give your phase gate timeline a name and a snapshot/status date:

Click the Create new project view button, and you'll start out with a milestone report like this:

Now, we'll make a few cosmetic changes. First, we'll turn the diamond symbols into numbered milestones for each phase gate. To go this, go to Home > Project View Properties > Milestones and click on the Manage Rules button at the bottom. We'll add a rule to assign a unique symbol and color for each type of phase gate:

Back on the Milestones tab, we're going to turn off milestone labels (they're repetitive) and show the dates for phase gates instead:
To change the font, format, or position of date labels, you can click the Date Label Properties button.

Click OK. The new symbols, colors and dates are in place, but are a little hard to read, so we'll make one more edit.

Our final change will be to align all of the phase gates up by project so that we have multiple milestones on one line. To do this, go to Home > Project View Properties > Rows/Swimlanes. We want to change the Rows setting at the top to Collect tasks into rows by "Project Name". This will put all of the phase gates for a single project in one row: